Tag: raid

I just wanted to get something up today that would let many more people know & learn about Dr. Forest Tennant. I want everyone to know what is happening to this good man; this awesome wonderful doctor and friend of mine. I’m working on my own blog post but I wanted this up so that you could learn quickly and start helping. I want you to learn about Dr. Tennant and what he does for people. He helps the sickest of the sick. He helps people that other doctors don’t want to be bothered with; they just want to throw them away! Dr. Tennant is a good man and he doesn’t deserve what is happening to him. What’s happening now, is like what we think might happen in some Third World country!! Our country is changing for the worse! This isn’t the USA I ever remember and loved! What’s happening is fear mongering, craziness, bullying, and who knows what else?

Dr. Jeffrey Fudin, is a very close friend of Dr. Forest Tennant. I asked him if I could re-post this story from his blog today. He gave me permission to do so. I need to make sure you know that I did not write this piece. It is totally all Dr. Fudin’s writing & work here today except for this introduction. Please visit his blog @Paindr.com :

I was shocked to learn of the Gestapo tactics the DEA organized in the attack against Dr. Forest Tennant. What kind of world do we live in? I am not at all surprised however to see the outrage amongst my peers to rise up in support of Dr. Tennant’s well-mannered and careful dedication to his patients. When asked an open-ended question by a prominent professional group regarding this mockery, my first response was, “Perhaps the DEA did the world a favor – this time they screwed with the wrong person and their bungling actions will reverberate pervasively.” I suspect almost every leading pain clinician scholar will line up to offer expert witness services in support of Dr. Tennant should the DEA contemptuous actions against Dr. Tennant ever make it to court.

If anybody Tweets, posts, or shares any comment on social media, please include this hashtag, #DropTheTennantCase.

Dr. Morty Fein was kind enough to provide some backdrop and clever insight to the alternative news associated with the DEA raid on Dr. Tennant and the patients the patients and community that will be harmed as a result.

Here’s what he had to say in his piece entitled,

The Fifth Vital ….Sigh

When there is regime change there is often a purge of anything and everything associated with the prior (often disgraced) movement and its rulers. History gets rewritten and we move on to a new and improved world. In pain politics, the opiophiles have been replaced by the opiophobes in power and every remnant of prior rule, every concept and tenet ends up getting dragged through the mud and discarded. Sigh.

Witness what has happened to the notion of pseudoaddiction. It has been ridiculed without a critical look at its continued importance. Because an executive from a company accused (often correctly but just as often overzealously) of overzealous marketing of opioids wrote an “n of 1 paper” based on a sincere and accurate appraisal of a troubling observation during his early years of pain practice – many years before he left practice and became an executive – the notion has been tied to overpromotion of opioids in the media and by opiophobes. Never mind the fact that the notion is even more important now since the stingy approach to opioid availability is daily leading to even worse pain control for millions and in turn causing desperation. And desperation can lead to people acting in ways that are uncharacteristic of them and their behavior construed as a sign of addiction. Happens every day. Often. Several authors, including the original authors, have over the years written about the need to re-evaluate the concept; not the validity of the observation but in what clinicians need to do to safely respond to it. The answer is not the knee jerk raising of opioid doses that became a bit of a caricature during the early days of the opiophile revolution, but a reappraisal of the totality of the patient’s pain regimen and approach and a sincere respect for the fact that a person taking liberties with their opioids or augmenting with anything including street drugs can indeed trigger a behavioral loss of control that needs to be addressed and not solely relying on improved analgesia to stop the behavior. Loss of control and uncontrolled pain are not mutually exclusive. Regardless of what drives the drug taking behavior and loss of control, abuse and even overdose can result. Perhaps this is why lowering MSEs nationally is not decreasing the number of opioid overdoses and in fact they are increasing them. The notion is self-effacing for us HCPs – that it is our failure to control pain that can drive the desperation and we have the responsibility to help fix it and the behavioral syndrome accompanying it – if anyone has the time and reimbursement anymore in our healthcare system for this much soul-searching and critical thought. Sigh.

And of course, the pain as the 5th vital sign movement has also been ridiculed as a simple ploy by pharma to lead to more pain assessment solely because it would lead to the more opioid prescribing not to simply bring pain and suffering out of the shadows and raise awareness. Outrageous and laughable contend the opiophobes. That people suffer in silence, that they are afraid to tell their health care providers, that unless they are asked they will often assume that discussion of their pain is not the purview of the providers with whom they are interacting is a trite every day observation doesn’t prevent throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Pain as a 5th vital sign is a movement about communication not treatment. Let us not go back to the bad old days of don’t ask don’t tell about pain and suffering. Want to change the name of it? Fine. But we shouldn’t stop efforts to ask about our patients’ experiences of suffering. We should avoid knee jerk reactions driving what we are going to do about it. Simply because someone reports their pain as “8 out of 10” doesn’t mean we should knee jerk raise their opioid dose nor should we knee jerk increase the frequency of their meditation sessions. It requires time and thought and a self-effacing attitude that we can do better for the person and a commitment to do better for the person. If anyone has the time and reimbursement anymore in our healthcare system for this much soul-searching and critical thought. Sigh.

And while we are on the subject of regime change, some of the most expert, most ethical and most erudite former leaders in the opioid movement are being dragged through the mud and the legal system on virtually a daily basis nationwide, tormented by district attorneys and ambulance chasers who would beg any one of them to care for them or their family members if they were stricken with severe and unrelenting chronic pain. Virtually everything they ever wrote, said or did being misportayed and misrepresented as they get held responsible for consequences of treatments that occurred in jurisdictions they never set foot in. As if writing or talking or doing everything they could for opioid safety was just a ploy for pharma to push more drugs. No, it was a move to try to help others if they were going to do opioid therapy to adopt a seriousness and responsibility and acquire expertise like their own. They may have overestimated the integrity of their peers that went on to run pill mills but they never advocated for pill mills. They may have underestimated the size of the gap between their own expertise and that of their brethren that would try to emulate them. But they never advocated for carelessness or lack of responsibility. They wanted us all to take a self-effacing (i.e. that we all need to learn more about pain) and responsible and thoughtful approach. As if anyone has the time and reimbursement anymore in our healthcare system for this much soul-searching and critical thought. Sigh.

This brings me to the raiding of the home and practice of the beloved and venerated Dr. Forest Tennant. His Thanksgiving gift was a storm trooper’s boot in his door – by a cop who has a better sense of what the doctor’s patients need than the doctor (with 50 years plus of experience) does. And who I am certain would beg Dr. Tennant to care for him and his family if they were stricken with unrelenting chronic pain. Dr. Tennant called them and their scare tactics out in an interview right after the events and he intends to fight. Be Brave! Don’t run Forest, don’t run!

Free the Opioid 5 I say.

It is time to stand and fight. Regime change and the re-writing of history must stop now. Our support for these 5 is vital. Sigh.

Here’s some information about Dr Fudin. This information was taken directly from his own website/Blog , also at paindr.com…. I didn’t want to get anything wrong and so this too, is directly copied from his Blog. All rights are reserved by him and everything here today is all his work and his writing and not mine! Please read about Dr Fudin:

Adjunct Associate Professor, Western New England University College of Pharmacy

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Pharmacy Practice, University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy

Section Editor, Pain Medicine

Dr. Fudin graduated from Albany College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences with his Bachelors Degree and Pharm.D. He completed an Oncology/Hematology fellowship at SUNY/Upstate Medical Center. He is a Diplomate to the American Academy of Pain Management and a Fellow of both the American College of Clinical Pharmacy and the American Society of Health-system Pharmacists.

Dr. Fudin is a Section Editor for Pain Medicine, Founder/Chairman of Professionals for Rational Opioid Monitoring & Pharmacotherapy, and peer reviewer for several professional journals. He has participated in developing practice guidelines for use of opioids in chronic noncancer pain (APS, AAPM collaborative) and participated in national and international guideline development for arthritis, fibromyalgia, and palliative Care. He has also participated in the development and co-author guidelines for the treatment of opioid-induced constipation. He is consultant to a national panel to develop consensus guidelines for the proper use of urine testing in addiction medicine, a collaborative effort with the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers (NAATP), Center for Lawful Access and Abuse Deterrence (CLAAD), and the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM). And he is a panel member for new urine test guidelines under development by the American Academy of Pain Medicine.

Dr. Fudin is President and Director for Scientific and Clinical Affairs for REMITIGATE, LLC, a software development company specializing in opioid safety. He practices as a Clinical Pharmacy Specialist and Director, PGY-2 Pharmacy Pain Residency Programs at the Stratton Veterans Administration Medical Center in Albany NY. He holds adjunct faculty positions at University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy, Western New England University College of Pharmacy in Springfield MA, and Albany College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences. Dr. Fudin has been an invited speaker on pain management nationally and internationally.

Dr. Fudin is founder and Chair of Professionals for Rational Opioid Monitoring and Pharmacotherapy (PROMPT), owner and managing editor for paindr.com and founder of Remitigate LLC, a software development company that has launched an application to help clinicians interpret urine drugs screens with several pipeline products including a pharmacogenetic applications and other opioid safety software initiatives. He is a prolific lecturer, writer, and researcher on pain management topics and he served as a Task Force member for the Board of Pharmacy Specialties (BPS) for role delineation study/practice analysis of pain and palliative care pharmacy. He was awarded the American Academy of Pain Medicine’s Presidential Commendation in 2014, in recognition as “a voice for scientific integrity and an advocate for people in pain.”

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You will find more "about me" here: About.me/Suzydukettes. I am a survivor first! I am a Chronic Pain Patient who lives with Severe Systemic-Full Body RSD/CRPS, the highest form of chronic pain known; at #43 on McGill Pain Scale. I live with RSD/CRPS and several other high pain illnesses. I continue to be a mentor for newly DX RSD/CRPS patients. I'm a blogger and Author/regular columnist for "National Pain Report". I'm a Patient Leader for WEGO Health as well as being a freelance writer for several different venues. I've done feature commercials for IDA.
I not only blog for my own therapy of sorts, but in the hope of helping others. I blog sometimes for RSDSA, RSDHOPE and others. I'm founder of R.A.S.E.for CRPS (@RASEforCRPS on Twitter, RASEforCRPS on Instagram and RASEforCRPS.tumblr.com). Also I founded "People In Pain Unite" on Facebook/Twitter-(@ppl-InPainUnite)/Instagram. On Instagram, I also have a page named: "InvisibleDiseases".
I've been a Patient Health advocate/activist since 2007. I have an Advocacy page at: www.youtube.com/Suzydukettes . I also have a sign Language Youtube page where I post ASL Covers of Many different kinds of songs. The ASL Youtube page is found if you Google "ASLSUZYQ". Along with doing these things; I enjoy being an Ambassador for the U.S. Pain Foundation. I do awareness events and fundraisers for them. I always say that "HOPE is a verb, and in order to have it, you must do something". To keep it, you have to keep doing, trying & not giving up. Most everything you need to know about me, or to find me on Social Media, you can find at: about.me/suzydukettes ...OR suzydukettes.wordpress.com
**I am not a Medical Dr nor do I claim to be an expert regarding any of the subjects I may write about. I write from my own experiences. Also, Please don't copy or reproduce any part of this blog without my permission. Thank you!